Word: tunguska
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...news: 2007 WD5 has only a 1-in-75 chance of actually hitting Mars, which means astronomers would be wise to be pessimistic. But the possibility of impact calls to mind a loosely related incident that occurred almost exactly 100 years ago, when something exploded above the Tunguska region of Siberia, flattening trees in a 25-mile radius, their trunks pointing outward from the epicenter of the blast. Scientists are pretty sure it was a comet or asteroid - about the same size as 2007 WD5, as it happens - that disintegrated from its own shock wave as it plowed through...
...June 1908, a stray space rock—now thought to be a comet—hurtled toward the Tunguska River in Siberia and exploded about five miles above the ground. Observers tens of miles away from ground zero reported that the “sky split in two,” the air became unbearably hot, and a shock wave threw people against the ground. The force of the explosion leveled 500 square miles of forest...
...called Tunguska event dramatically illustrates what the dinosaurs painfully learned 65 million years ago: asteroids and comets do collide with earth. Geologists and astronomers believe that an asteroid several miles across crashed onto land then, kicking up enough dust to block out sunlight worldwide for years, leading to reduced agriculture and mass starvation. The same could happen to humans today should a “near-earth object,” or NEO, of that size crash into, say, Massachusetts...
...years ago,” said Brian G. Marsden, the director emeritus of the Minor Planet Center (MPC) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in a phone interview. And they’ll come eventually: kilometer-wide NEOs strike the earth every few hundred thousand years, with Tunguska-size NEOs striking about once per century...
...Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places...